Kickass Women Of The Day: Four Female NASA Recruits!

One small step for women, one giant leap for womenkind! That’s right, four of the eight new astronauts selected by NASA are women. Being the first new recruits in four years, the eight astronauts will join fellow NASA folk at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston. The ladies are Christina Hammock, 34; Nicole Aunapu Mann, 35; Anne McClain, 34, and Jessica Meir PhD, 35. Together they comprise the highest percentage of female astronaut candidates that NASA has ever selected! In 1998, there had been four women in the astronaut candidate class, but they only counted for 16 percent of the 25-member class.

It’s great that young girls — and boys — will see more high-profile women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) in the U.S. But as Karen Kaplan writes in The Los Angeles Times, “the fact that we’re even talking about whether these new astronauts are men or women is a sign that there’s still a ways to go.” I agree — won’t it be nice one day when this is not news?